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Who you are is defined by what youre willing to struggle for.
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You and everyone you know are going to be dead soon. And in the short amount of time between here and there, you have a limited amount of fucks to give. Very few, in fact. And if you go around giving a fuck about everything and everyone without conscious thought or choicewell, then youre going to get fucked.
Mark Manson,
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life
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The desire for more positive experience is itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically, the acceptance of ones negative experience is itself a positive experience. (p.9)
Mark Manson,
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life
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Everything worthwhile in life is won through surmounting the associated negative experience. Any attempt to escape the negative, to avoid it or quash it or silence it, only backfires. The avoidance of suffering is a form of suffering. The avoidance of struggle is a struggle. The denial of failure is a failure. Hiding what is shameful is itself a form of shame.Pain is an inextricable thread in the fabric of life, and to tear it out is not only impossible, but destructive: attempting to tear it out unravels everything else with it. To try to avoid pain is to give too many fucks about pain. In contrast, if youre able to not give a fuck about the pain, you become unstoppable." ~~~~
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Unhealthy love is based on two people trying to escape their problems through their emotions for each otherin other words, theyre using each other as an escape. Healthy love is based on two people acknowledging and addressing their own problems with each others support.
Mark Manson,
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life
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Life is essentially an endless series of problems. The solution to one problem is merely the creation of another.
Mark Manson,
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life
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To be happy we need something to solve. Happiness is therefore a form of action;
Mark Manson,
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life
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This is the most simple and basic component of life: our struggles determine our successes.
Mark Manson,
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life
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Dont just sit there. Do something. The answers will follow.
Mark Manson,
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life
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Maturity is what happens when one learns to only give a fuck about whats truly fuckworthy. As
Mark Manson,
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life
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Our crisis is no longer material; its existential, its spiritual. We have so much fucking stuff and so many opportunities that we dont even know what to give a fuck about anymore.
Mark Manson,
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life
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There is a simple realization from which all personal improvement and growth emerges. This is the realization that we, individually, are responsible for everything in our lives, no matter the external circumstances. We dont always control what happens to us. But we always control how we interpret what happens to us, as well as how we respond. Whether we consciously recognize it or not, we are always responsible for our experiences. Its impossible not to be. Choosing to not consciously interpret events in our lives is still an interpretation of the events of our lives. Choosing
Mark Manson,
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life
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The more something threatens your identity, the more you will avoid it.
Mark Manson,
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life
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In my life, I have given a fuck about many people and many things. I have also not given a fuck about many people and many things. And like the road not taken, it was the fucks not given that made all the difference.
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Travel is a fantastic self-development tool, because it extricates you from the values of your culture and shows you that another society can live with entirely different values and still function and not hate themselves. This exposure to different cultural values and metrics then forces you to reexamine what seems obvious in your own life and to consider that perhaps its not necessarily the best way to live.
Mark Manson,
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life
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Being open with your insecurities paradoxically makes you more confident and charismatic around others. The pain of honest confrontation is what generates the greatest trust and respect in your relationships. Suffering through your fears and anxieties is what allows you to build courage and perseverance. Seriously,
Mark Manson,
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life
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We suffer for the simple reason that suffering is biologically useful. It is natures preferred agent for inspiring change. We have evolved to always live with a certain degree of dissatisfaction and insecurity, because its the mildly dissatisfied and insecure creature thats going to do the most work to innovate and survive.
Mark Manson,
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life
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My recommendation: dont be special; dont be unique. Redefine your metrics in mundane and broad ways. Choose to measure yourself not as a rising star or an undiscovered genius. Choose to measure yourself not as some horrible victim or dismal failure. Instead, measure yourself by more mundane identities: a student, a partner, a friend, a creator.The narrower and rarer the identity you choose for yourself, the more everything will seem to threaten you. For that reason, define yourself in the simplest and most ordinary ways possible.This often means giving up some grandiose ideas about yourself: that youre uniquely intelligent, or spectacularly talented, or intimidatingly attractive, or especially victimized in ways other people could never imagine. This means giving up your sense of entitlement and your belief that youre somehow owed something by this world.
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If you want to change how you see your problems, you have to change what you value and/or how you measure failure/success.
Mark Manson,
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life
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Being wrong opens us up to the possibility of change. Being wrong brings the opportunity for growth.
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Dont hope for a life without problems, the panda said. Theres no such thing. Instead, hope for a life full of good problems. And
Mark Manson,
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life
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Because when we give too many fucks, when we choose to give a fuck about everything, then we feel as though we are perpetually entitled to feel comfortable and happy at all times, thats when life fucks us.
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Because heres the thing thats wrong with all of the How to Be Happy shit thats been shared eight million times on Facebook in the past few yearsheres what nobody realizes about all of this crap: The desire for more positive experience is itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically, the acceptance of ones negative experience is itself a positive experience. This is a total mind-fuck. So Ill give you a minute to unpretzel your brain and maybe read that again: Wanting positive experience is a negative experience; accepting negative experience is a positive experience. Its what the philosopher Alan Watts used to refer to as the backwards lawthe idea that the more you pursue feeling better all the time, the less satisfied you become, as pursuing something only reinforces the fact that you lack it in the first place. The
Mark Manson,
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life
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The desire for more positive experience is itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically, the acceptance of ones negative experience is itself a positive experience.
Mark Manson,
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life
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People get addicted to feeling offended all the time because it gives them a high; being self-righteous and morally superior feels good.
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If youre stuck on a problem, dont sit there and think about it; just start working on it. Even if you dont know what youre doing, the simple act of working on it will eventually cause the right ideas to show up in your head.
Mark Manson,
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life
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Not giving a fuck does not mean being indifferent; it means being comfortable with being different. Lets
Mark Manson,
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life
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No matter where you go, theres a five-hundred-pound load of shit waiting for you. And thats perfectly fine. The point isnt to get away from the shit. The point is to find the shit you enjoy dealing with.
Mark Manson,
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life
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Decision-making based on emotional intuition, without the aid of reason to keep it in line, pretty much always sucks. You know who bases their entire lives on their emotions? Three-year-old kids. And dogs. You know what else three-year-olds and dogs do? Shit on the carpet.
Mark Manson,
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life
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Romeo and Juliet is synonymous with romance in our culture today. It is seen as the love story in English-speaking culture, an emotional ideal to live up to. Yet when you really get down to what happens in the story, these kids are absolutely out of their fucking minds. And they just killed themselves to prove it!
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The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life
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It turns out that adversity and failure are actually useful and even necessary for developing strong-minded and successful adults.
Mark Manson,
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life
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We are defined by what we choose to reject. And if we reject nothing we essentially have no identity at all
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Everybody enjoys what feels good. Everyone wants to live a carefree, happy, and easy life, to fall in love and have amazing sex and relationships, to look perfect and make money and be popular and well-respected and admired and a total baller to the point that people part like the Red Sea when they walk into the room. Everybody wants that. Its easy to want that. A more interesting question, a question that most people never consider, is, What pain do you want in your life? What are you willing to struggle for? Because that seems to be a greater determinant of how our lives turn out. For
Mark Manson,
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life
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The act of choosing a value for yourself requires rejecting alternative values. If I choose to make my marriage the most important part of my life, that means Im (probably) choosing not to make cocaine-fueled hooker orgies an important part of my life. If Im choosing to judge myself based on my ability to have open and accepting friendships, that means Im rejecting trashing my friends behind their backs. These are all healthy decisions, yet they require rejection at every turn. The point is this: we all must give a fuck about something, in order to value something. And to value something, we must reject what is not that something. To value X, we must reject non-X. That
Mark Manson,
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life
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But a true and accurate measurement of ones self-worth is how people feel about the negative aspects of themselves.
Mark Manson,
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life
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If you think about a young child trying to learn to walk, that child will fall down and hurt itself hundreds of times. But at no point does that child ever stop and think, Oh, I guess walking just isnt for me. Im not good at it. Avoiding
Mark Manson,
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life
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Were apes. We think were all sophisticated with our toaster ovens and designer footwear, but were just a bunch of finely ornamented apes.
Mark Manson,
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life
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Essentially, we become more selective about the fucks we're willing to give. This is something called maturity. It's nice; you should try it sometime. Maturity is what happens when one learns to only give a fuck about what's truly fuck-worthy. As Bunk Moreland said to his partner Detective McNulty in THE WIRE: "That's what you get for giving a fuck when it wasn't your turn to give a fuck.
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The ticket to emotional health, like that to physical health, comes from eating your veggiesthat is, accepting the bland and mundane truths of life: truths such as Your actions actually dont matter that much in the grand scheme of things and The vast majority of your life will be boring and not noteworthy, and thats okay. This vegetable course will taste bad at first. Very bad. You will avoid accepting it. But once ingested, your body will wake up feeling more potent and more alive. After all, that constant pressure to be something amazing, to be the next big thing, will be lifted off your back. The stress and anxiety of always feeling inadequate and constantly needing to prove yourself will dissipate. And the knowledge and acceptance of your own mundane existence will actually free you to accomplish what you truly wish to accomplish, without judgment or lofty expectations. You
Mark Manson,
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life
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Our culture today is obsessively focused on unrealistically positive expectations: Be happier. Be healthier. Be the best, better than the rest. Be smarter, faster, richer, sexier, more popular, more productive, more envied, and more admired. Be perfect and amazing and crap out twelve-karat-gold nuggets before breakfast each morning while kissing your selfie-ready spouse and two and a half kids goodbye. Then fly your helicopter to your wonderfully fulfilling job, where you spend your days doing incredibly meaningful work thats likely to save the planet one day. But
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The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life
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Commitment gives you freedom because youre no longer distracted by the unimportant and frivolous. Commitment gives you freedom because it hones your attention and focus, directing them toward what is most efficient at making you healthy and happy. Commitment makes decision-making easier and removes any fear of missing out; knowing that what you already have is good enough, why would you ever stress about chasing more, more, more again? Commitment allows you to focus intently on a few highly important goals and achieve a greater degree of success than you otherwise would.
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We are responsible for experiences that arent our fault all the time. This is part of life.
Mark Manson,
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life
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This, in a nutshell, is what self-improvement is really about: prioritizing better values, choosing better things to give a fuck about. Because when you give better fucks, you get better problems. And when you get better problems,
Mark Manson,
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life
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We can be truly successful only at something were willing to fail at. If were unwilling to fail, then were unwilling to succeed.
Mark Manson,
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life
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We are so materially well off, yet so psychologically tormented in so many low-level and shallow ways. People relinquish all responsibility, demanding that society cater to their feelings and sensibilities. People hold on to arbitrary certainties and try to enforce them on others, often violently, in the name of some made-up righteous cause. People, high on a sense of false superiority, fall into inaction and lethargy for fear of trying something worthwhile and failing at it.
Mark Manson,
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life
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Self-awareness is like an onion. There are multiple layers to it, and the more you peel them back, the more likely you're going to start crying at an inappropriate time.
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Happiness is a constant work-in-progress, because solving problems is a constant work-in-progressthe solutions to todays problems will lay the foundation for tomorrows problems, and so on. True happiness occurs only when you find the problems you enjoy having and enjoy solving. Sometimes
Mark Manson,
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life
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the more you pursue feeling better all the time, the less satisfied you become, as pursuing something only reinforces the fact that you lack it in the first place. The
Mark Manson,
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life
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Because heres something thats weird but true: we dont actually know what a positive or negative experience is. Some of the most difficult and stressful moments of our lives also end up being the most formative and motivating. Some of the best and most gratifying experiences of our lives are also the most distracting and demotivating. Dont trust your conception of positive/negative experiences. All that we know for certain is what hurts in the moment and what doesnt. And thats not worth much. Just
Mark Manson,
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life
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People get addicted to feeling offended all the time because it gives them a high; being self-righteous and morally superior feels good. As political cartoonist Tim Kreider put it in a New York Times op-ed: Outrage is like a lot of other things that feel good but over time devour us from the inside out. And its even more insidious than most vices because we dont even consciously acknowledge that its a pleasure.
Mark Manson,
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life
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Yet, in a bizarre, backwards way, death is the light by which the shadow of all of lifes meaning is measured. Without death, everything would feel inconsequential, all experience arbitrary, all metrics and values suddenly zero.
Mark Manson,
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life
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But the problem with entitlement is that it makes people need to feel good about themselves all the time, even at the expense of those around them. And because entitled people always need to feel good about themselves, they end up spending most of their time thinking about themselves. After all, it takes a lot of energy and work to convince yourself that your shit doesnt stink, especially when youve actually been living in a toilet. Once
Mark Manson,
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life
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I remember discussing this dynamic with my Russian teacher one day, and he had an interesting theory. Having lived under communism for so many generations, with little to no economic opportunity and caged by a culture of fear, Russian society found the most valuable currency to be trust. And to build trust you have to be honest. That means when things suck, you say so openly and without apology. Peoples displays of unpleasant honesty were rewarded for the simple fact that they were necessary for survivalyou had to know whom you could rely on and whom you couldnt, and you needed to know quickly. But, in the free West, my Russian teacher continued, there existed an abundance of economic opportunityso much economic opportunity that it became far more valuable to present yourself in a certain way, even if it was false, than to actually be that way. Trust lost its value. Appearances and salesmanship became more advantageous forms of expression. Knowing a lot of people superficially was more beneficial than knowing a few people closely. This is why it became the norm in Western cultures to smile and say polite things even when you dont feel like it, to tell little white lies and agree with someone whom you dont actually agree with. This is why people learn to pretend to be friends with people they dont actually like, to buy things they dont actually want. The economic system promotes such deception. The downside of this is that you never know, in the West, if you can completely trust the person youre talking to. Sometimes this is the case even among good friends or family members. There is such pressure in the West to be likable that people often reconfigure their entire personality depending on the person theyre dealing with. Rejection
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The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life
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I say dont find yourself. I say never know who you are. Because thats what keeps you striving and discovering. And it forces you to remain humble in your judgments and accepting of the differences in others.
Mark Manson,
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life
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Sadly, to deny ones negative emotions is to deny many of the feedback mechanisms that help a person solve problems.
Mark Manson,
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life
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One of those realizations was this: that life itself is a form of suffering. The rich suffer because of their riches. The poor suffer because of their poverty. People without a family suffer because they have no family. People with a family suffer because of their family. People who pursue worldly pleasures suffer because of their worldly pleasures. People who abstain from worldly pleasures suffer because of their abstention.This isnt to say that all suffering is equal. Some suffering is certainly more painful than other suffering. But we all must suffer nonetheless.
Mark Manson,
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life
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We are actually often happier with less. When were overloaded with opportunities and options, we suffer from what psychologists refer to as the paradox of choice. Basically, the more options were given, the less satisfied we become with whatever we choose, because were aware of all the other options were potentially forfeiting.
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These five values are both unconventional and uncomfortable. But, to me, they are life-changing. The first, which well look at in the next chapter, is a radical form of responsibility: taking responsibility for everything that occurs in your life, regardless of whos at fault. The second is uncertainty: the acknowledgement of your own ignorance and the cultivation of constant doubt in your own beliefs. The next is failure: the willingness to discover your own flaws and mistakes so that they may be improved upon. The fourth is rejection: the ability to both say and hear no, thus clearly defining what you will and will not accept in your life. The final value is the contemplation of ones own mortality; this one is crucial, because paying vigilant attention to ones own death is perhaps the only thing capable of helping us keep all our other values in proper perspective.
Mark Manson,
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life
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Many people, when they feel some form of pain or anger or sadness, drop everything and attend to numbing out whatever they're feeling. Their goal is to get back to "feeling good" again as quickly as possible, even if that means substances or deluding themselves or returning to their shitty values. Learn to sustain the pain you've chosen. When you choose a new value, you are choosing to introduce a new form of pain into your life. Relish it. Savor it. Welcome it with open arms. Then act despite it.
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Like physical pain, our psychological pain is an indication of something out of equilibrium, some limitation that has been exceeded. And like our physical pain, our psychological pain is not necessarily always bad or even undesirable.
Mark Manson,
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life
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